MSK 011 Transistor Mixer
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MSK 011 Transistor Mixer North Coast Synthesis Ltd. Matthew Skala August 31, 2021 Documentation for the MSK 011 Copyright © 2018, 2020, 2021 Matthew Skala This documentation is free: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3. This documentation is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PUR- POSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this documentation. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. 2 Contents General notes 4 Specifications ................................................ 4 Controls and connections ......................................... 4 Source package ............................................... 5 PCBs and physical design ......................................... 5 Component substitutions ......................................... 5 PNP transistor modification ........................................ 5 Modification for ±15V power ....................................... 6 Use and contact information ........................................ 6 Safety and other warnings 7 Bill of materials 8 Building the module 9 Preliminaries ................................................ 9 Some notes on knobs ............................................ 9 Panel components ............................................. 10 Fixed resistors ............................................... 10 Trimmer potentiometer .......................................... 12 Transistors ................................................. 12 Diodes .................................................... 12 Capacitors .................................................. 13 Power header ................................................ 13 Final assembly ............................................... 13 Adjustment and testing 15 Short-circuit test .............................................. 15 Output offset adjustment ......................................... 15 Patch ideas 16 Circuit explanation 18 Transistor rules ............................................... 18 Input buffers ................................................ 18 Mixing network ............................................... 19 Output amplifier .............................................. 19 AC coupling network ............................................ 20 Mechanical drawings 21 3 General notes This manual documents the MSK 011 Transistor sensitive pitch-CV applications if one wants to keep Mixer, which is a utility mixer module for use with the pitches exactly in tune; the North Coast Synthe- both audio and control voltages in a Eurorack mod- sis Ltd. MSK 008 Dual VC Octave Switch, with its ular synthesizer. It is a minimalist design using only precision adders based on op amp chips, may be a six transistors and no integrated circuits. better choice for exact pitch control. The Transis- tor Mixer is intended, instead, for users who want Specifications to embrace the organic variability of classic discrete- This module is designed to mount in 6HP of rack transistor circuits. space in a standard 3U Eurorack case. This module (assuming a correct build using the The module’s maximum current requirement in recommended components) is protected against re- ordinary use is 9mA on the +12V supply and 14mA verse power connection. It will not function with the on the −12V supply. Unusual loads on the outputs, power reversed, but will not suffer or cause any dam- including directly-connected headphones or speak- age. Some other kinds of misconnection may possibly ers and so-called “passive” modules, may cause the be dangerous to the module or the power supply. MSK 011 to draw more than this amount of current. It does not require +5V power. Controls and connections The input impedance is nominally 100kΩ for all Here’s a summary of the items on the front panel of inputs, varying a little with control knob positions. the module. The output impedance is nominally 5kΩ. Separate inputs one for each of the four channels. Note AC and DC coupled outputs are provided. Shorting the top one is normalled to a positive voltage any input or output to any fixed voltage at or between (equivalent to roughly +6V) and the bottom to the power rails should be harmless to the module; a negative voltage (about −6V). patching the MSK 011’s output into the output of gain controls one knob for each channel. These some other module on the same power system should are non-inverting, logarithmic controls. For the be harmless to the MSK 011, though doing that is not top and bottom channels, if there is nothing recommended because it is possible the other module plugged into the corresponding input jack, the may be harmed. knob controls the amount of DC offset. You Voltage gain for each channel can be adjusted be- should set these knobs to zero, that is, fully tween zero and a little more than unity. The mixer counterclockwise, if you are not using them as is designed to handle input and output signals over inputs and don’t want a DC offset. a range of at least ±8V; it is harmless to the module DC output the result of mixing the four inputs. to drive the inputs all the way to the power rails, but AC output same as the DC output, but with a sim- such signals will clip. ple filter to block DC. The cutoff frequency de- The very simple Class A transistor amplifiers used pends on the load you apply, but would typi- in this module are subject to temperature-dependent cally be less than 1Hz, so this output is suitable DC offset. There is a trimmer provided on the circuit even for control voltages if they are reasonably board for overall adjustment, and the DC level can be fast-moving. fine-tuned in many patches with the normalled offset Also note, on the circuit board behind the panel, controls on the front panel; however, in patches where the offset trimmer, labelled “R7 100k offset null.” it is important to avoid any DC offset at all, it may This will have been pre-set when the module was be preferable to use the AC-coupled output. Since it built, but it can be adjusted again later if necessary. also may be difficult to adjust the gain controls to ex- Adjustment range for this trimmer is approximately actly unity, this mixer may not be the best choice for ±2V. 4 Source package con amplifier transistors with gain in the range of a A ZIP archive containing source code for this doc- few hundred; to be honest, they are higher specifi- ument and for the module itself, including things cation than this circuit needs. Any transistors used like machine-readable CAD files, is available from the should be able to handle the full power supply volt- Web site at https://northcoastsynthesis.com/. age (24V) between collector and emitter, and at least Be aware that actually building from source requires about 10mA of current. Low-gain transistors (less some manual steps; Makefiles for GNU Make are pro- than about 30 or 40) may have some impact on the vided, but you may need to manually generate PDFs accuracy and available gain of the mixing, but if you from the CAD files for inclusion in the document, are using such transistors, you probably intend for make Gerbers from the PCB design, manually edit them to have an effect. Any other effects of transis- the .csv bill of materials files if you change the bill of tor substitution are likely to be very subtle. It is not materials, and so on. necessary to match transistors, though if two channel Recommended software for use with the source buffers have very different transistors in them, then code includes: those channels may end up sounding different from • GNU Make; each other. • LATEX for document compilation; When substituting NPN transistors, connect the • LaTeX.mk (Danjean and Legrand, not to be collector, base, and emitter to the pads marked “C,” confused with other similarly-named LATEX- “B,” and “E” on the board according to the pinout automation tools); of the specific transistors you are using, even if that • Circuit_macros (for in-document schematic di- does not match the flat side of the TO-92 outline in agrams); the silkscreen (which refers to the 2N5088 pinout). • Kicad (electronic design automation); Fairchild/ON Semi, formerly the main manufac- • Qcad (2D drafting); and turer of 2N5088 transistors, announced their discon- • Perl (for the BOM-generating script). tinuation while this product was in development. The kicad-symbols/ subdirectory contains my North Coast made a lifetime buy and we should be customised schematic symbol and PCB footprint li- able to continue supplying kits and modules with braries for Kicad. Kicad doesn’t consistently keep 2N5088 transistors for the foreseeable future. As dependencies like symbols inside a project directory, of this writing, Central Semiconductor still makes so on my system, these files actually live in a central 2N5088 transistors. But most other small NPN am- directory shared by many projects. As a result, upon plifier transistors should also work well in this circuit unpacking the ZIP file you may need to do some re- and could be substituted; the transistor selection is configuration of the library paths stored inside the not critical. project files, in order to allow the symbols and foot- On substituting other components: we suggest 1% prints to be found. Also, this directory will probably metal film fixed resistors throughout, because these contain some extra bonus